On the Monte Carlo Rally’s second stage, Oliver Solberg made sure he was going to be the talk of the rally with a superlative stage win. Over half a minute up on the rest of the field, he’d made the first – and biggest – step towards making history.
A few minutes later on that same stage, a Ford Fiesta Rally3 ended up stuck in a ditch. With no fans around to help, its driver Matteo Fontana had to retire.
That, surely, would leave him with nothing to fight for. With 20 minutes lost to his class rivals in WRC3, the hope of a good result was surely gone.
How wrong such an assumption would be. On Sunday morning, the name Matteo Fontana was suddenly thrust into the limelight.
Media around the world readied themselves to declare the return of Lancia to the top of the WRC timesheets. Yohan Rossel had also retired on the first day and started far down the running order: with so much snow on the final day’s stages, he was able to take advantage and go faster than all the Rally1 drivers.
What they didn’t count on was Fontana in a Rally3 car being able to outpace them all.
“At the start of the morning,” said Fontana in his extended Club DirtFish interview, “I joked to my co-driver [Alessandro Arnaboldi]: ‘Oh, there’s snow, maybe today we can go first overall!’ But it was just a joke.
“I thought we could do a good stage but with everything behind uphill and lots of hairpins – it’s tricky with the Rally3, we have more weight than the Rally2 and Rally1 cars so it wasn’t easy for us.”
It certainly wasn’t easy. Initially it looked like 2024 Belgian champion Cédric Cherain would be the one to break Lancia hearts by going fastest on Col de Braus / La Cabanette – but a poor final sector opened the door. It wasn’t on TV but watching the splits was a nailbiter: up by 4.9s at split one, Rossel brought it back to -1.6s, then -0.2s and then -0.4s with only 2.7 kilometers to go. But Fontana clung on.
When Fontana reached the finish line to discover he’d won a WRC stage outright in his little Fiesta Rally3, he initially hadn’t understood what he’d achieved.
“Initially I thought I was just faster than all the Rally2 cars,” said Fontana. “I couldn’t imagine being faster than all the Rally2 cars because the day before, Saturday, I’d been third-fastest overall [on stage 11] – it was a Rally1, then [Yohan] Rossel and then me. So I thought, ‘OK, we are second in WRC2 with a Rally3.’
“But he [the stage end reporter] said ‘No, you are overall in front of Evans, Ogier and everyone’. I was… I mean, crazy. It’s the first overall stage win in a WRC race. It’s incredible.
“I had only won one stage overall in my entire life before that, at Rally San Marino on gravel in the Italian championship, in a Rally3 again against Rally2s. That was crazy in the moment. But in WRC, I couldn’t imagine it. It was totally unexpected; it was fantastic.”
It was a miracle surely not repeatable. Except the conditions were in his favor: snow was clearing on La Bollène-Vésubie / Moulinet as the field made its first pass across the Col de Turini.
The first stage win had been a surprise; Fontana knew there was a chance he could do it again on the next stage. And this was the one that really mattered.
“Since the first year I watched the Monte Carlo live [in-person] in 2012 until 2019, I have dreamed about the Turini,” said Fontana. “It was my favorite stage on the video games: I just wanted to do Turini, Turini, Turini!”
Fontana spent his whole life waiting for this moment. He’d binge-watched Sébastien Loeb’s onboard from 2015 of this exact stage, focusing on how clean and precise his inputs and lines had been on the ice and snow.
It didn’t start so well on La Bollène-Vésubie / Moulinet: he was already five seconds down on the first split. Game over?
No chance. While the drier conditions at the foot of the Col in La Bollène-Vésubie had helped Rossel, as the conditions worsened near the top he began to claw time back, finally turning the splits from red to green as he zoomed across the car park at the peak of the Col.
It was my favorite stage on the video games: I just wanted to do Turini, Turini, Turini!Matteo Fontana
He’d managed to get 1.9s ahead of Rossel but there was one final twist: he’d caught the blue, red and white Škoda Fabia of Albert von Thurn und Taxis.
“Because of the water on the road, I was getting a lot of [spray], so the visibility was not so good,” explained Fontana. “So I lost some seconds behind him – also because of the [impact on] concentration. He finally saw me at the second-last hairpin – he was completely sideways – and let me past.”
“I started thinking, maybe I didn’t win the stage because of that, maybe for only one tenth of a second.
“But luckily, it all went well…”
He’d won the Turini plenty of times in the virtual world. But even the world of fiction wouldn’t have dared to write that a Rally3 car could win a WRC stage outright.
Watch the extended DirtFish interview with Matteo Fontana exclusively on Club DirtFish.
